Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [17]
“I’m calling the Mother Superior,” she announced, as she headed toward the phone in the kitchen.
“No, Mom— Wait! I can’t stand first grade! I already know everything they’re teaching. Sister will tell you!”
And now for the trump card, my final hope:
“The Catholic Church says I should be in second grade! You have to obey the Church!”
She stopped and turned around for a split second and shot me the look of “you’ve got to be kidding me” and proceeded into the kitchen. She picked up the phone on the wall, asked the neighbor who was using our party line to please get off, and then she shut the sliding door and dialed the convent. I listened through the door while she respectfully, but forcefully, informed the Mother Superior that I was not to be moved up a grade. There were long pauses during which the nun was obviously making the SANE and CORRECT case to her as to why I was bored and getting into trouble and how I should have been in second grade (if not third!).
My mother replied that her mind had been made up and that was that. She closed the conversation by politely asking the Mother Superior not to make any other “unilateral” parenting decisions without her in the future. I didn’t quite know what that meant, but I knew what it felt like. Ouch. You don’t talk to the Mother Superior this way. I would pay for this, for sure.
Idle minds are either the work of the devil or the handmaiden of revolution. Although I was loved by all my nuns and lay teachers, they would be the first to tell you that I was also a bit of a handful. I had my own ideas about what the school should be doing and how it should be run. I would crack jokes in class and play pranks when necessary. As an altar boy, I would make faces at people during Communion while I held the gold plate under their chin so they wouldn’t drop the Lord. One time, Father Tomascheski caught me doing this and he halted the Communion and told me in a loud voice for the whole congregation to hear: “Wipe that smirk off your face!” It was the first time I heard the word smirk.
I had my own pretend TV show at school (complete with theme song), and I would involve the other kids in it as characters (I would tell them that hidden cameras were filming the show). I started my own paper and I wrote poems and plays. In eighth grade, I volunteered to write the Christmas play for the school pageant. When the authorities saw the dress rehearsal, it was decided that the show would not go on. In the play’s key scene, all the nation’s rodents came to St. John’s school in Davison and held their annual convention in our aging parish hall. The rodent situation was so bad in this place that in second grade, a mouse ran up the habit of Sister Ann Joseph—which jolted her out of her chair and had her doing the Watusi in order to shake the mouse out of her. So I thought it would be funny to write about this. In the final act, the parish hall collapses and kills all of the rats. The students and the nuns rejoice. Good triumphs over rodent. Joy reigns throughout the land.
The priest suggested the eighth grade just stand there and sing Christmas carols on the stage instead. I got most of the boys to join me in protest by not singing the first song. We just stood there, mouths shut, looking straight ahead. That was a bad idea because we stared straight into the Fear-of-God glare emanating from the Mother Superior. We were all singing by the next song, to be sure.
My mother should’ve just let me skip a grade. There would’ve been much less trouble for all concerned.
Search Party
FEW STREETS IN AMERICA are structured so that no matter whether you make a right turn or a left turn, you end up at a dead end.
Such was the street where I lived and grew up: East Hill Street, a one-block-long dirt and gravel lane with two dead ends. The only way to get onto this double-dead-end street was by taking another dead-end dirt lane known as Lapeer Street. Lapeer stretched from the railroad tracks on one end